One of the biggest beliefs I keep struggling with is the need to be perfect. I've been jamming away for many many weekends on a side project that literally was done. I just kept adding tiny tweaks left and right, until I literally just now launched it (https://amee.la).
Nothing ground breaking, and in the end nothing that needed to have so much perfectionism around.
The belief of having to need something perfect is one of the strongest I see among founders here on HN and elsewhere. It's almost always bad. I have zero examples where that ended up being good. Yet, even though the facts are clear, it's extremely hard to overcome.
* 'Refresh' neither looks like a refresh icon, nor has a label
* The fade on the right of the gallery implies you can scroll, but this isn't possible
* The generated logo + icon pair wasn't immediately noticeable (the first image is the icon without text, and the first icon isn't guaranteed to be noticeable), possibly generate image with text + logo on a transparent background and put it above the 4 sample images.
Haha, that's a bit of a cruel response to someone who just wrote he had a "perfection" problem.
You probably had OP to waste the entire week now.
WebDesign is a total time sink
This is good feedback though, as I had the same issues. It shows the value of launching and iterating quickly with user feedback, rather than building in the dark in the guise of perfection.
There's no kill like overkill. I've been overdoing a project for the last 5 years and I thoroughly enjoy it. The site is live and pays my bills so why not?
That being said, this comment feels more like self-promotion than conversation. Don't do that.
FYI the whole "lets type out some text" style is really, REALLY annoying. please just give the plain, non animated text on the screen. use whatever fonts or colors you want, BUT DON'T make the text type itself or jump around the screen.
If you actually shipped the extra weeks was probably worthwhile. My side project effort can be measured in decades with little real progress yet. I really think this year might see some movement.
Haha, what was happening to you the past couple weekends is just part of the whole process - now that you've experienced that, and beyond to releasing your side project, you won't allow yourself to that as easily next time.
I get really OCD at times and to avoid that I started focusing on "most basic functionality" and forced myself to launch when that experience was possible - from there everything I get caught up in is still an improvement.
I've done exactly that tho and I well overcooked a project holding it back til I had it just right.
Hopefully you didn't hate the experience and your better for it.
I liked the idea of the site immediately - logos can really suck and this site is perfect when a logo doesn't really matter enough to spend time on.
I'm sure your very limited in scope by trademarks and copyrights but a little more variety would be great. Colors would be awesome - choosing 2-3 would be better, that's with everything the same.
More background images or use my own option. Seriously tho - not a bad start at all. Fantastic side project.
I had no issues with the UI and was plugging away almost immediately.
Yeah, we are all susceptible to this. The tweaks were not worth the time because they didn't move the needle on the core offering. At the end of the day, this succeeds or fails based on how good the logos are. In my few minutes of trying this out, the generated logos were random, seemingly unrelated to the names, and just generally very unoriginal and low quality. I don't want to sound discouraging because this is a cool project, but just to say that spending time perfecting pixels and whatever else that doesn't have to do with the underlying functionality is probably not time well spent at this point.
This has been a mental barrier for me as well. I’m not sure if it’s in the realm of belief or rather fear of failure. Personally more inclined to say it’s the latter.
I’d argue that the fear of failure still boils down to underlying beliefs about:
- What it actually means to fail
- That failure is inherently bad
- What will happen next after failure occurs
- What it says about me when fail
- What others will think about me when I fail
- That I can’t recover from failure
etc.
If you grow up hearing that failure is bad/wrong/implies something about you as a person, it might never occur to you that another framing is that life is a series of experiments, and failure can be one of the best ways to zero in on success (in some cases, this may be the only possible way).
As far as I can tell, it’s beliefs all the way down, and adjusting certain beliefs can fundamentally transform experience relative to all downstream implications of that belief.
Nothing ground breaking, and in the end nothing that needed to have so much perfectionism around.
The belief of having to need something perfect is one of the strongest I see among founders here on HN and elsewhere. It's almost always bad. I have zero examples where that ended up being good. Yet, even though the facts are clear, it's extremely hard to overcome.